After three citywide water outages, Odessa will invest $25 million to fix infrastructure

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ODESSA — After three years of citywide outages that left thousands of residents without running water, the city council here will spend $25 million on projects that leaders hope will fix the issue.

The approved plans call for replacing nearly 200 of the city’s water valves, which help control the flow of water through 700 miles of pipes that carry roughly 28 million gallons of water daily into homes and businesses. The city will also replace 17,000 feet of pipe, more than three miles along two major roadways.

Council members and city staff hope the investment, paid for by profits from wastewater sales to an oil and gas company, will lead to lasting repairs to the city’s decades-old infrastructure that has languished with little more than temporary fixes.

“This is our problem to solve, we can’t point fingers,” said City Manager John Beckmeyer.

Water experts said the disruptions in Odessa underscore a problem in Texas: Hotter weather, drought and underfunding are hurting the state’s infrastructure. Voters last November approved $1 billion to upgrade Texas’ water infrastructure and supply. And yet, it is not enough. The Texas Water Development Board, which manages the state’s water supply, said it will take at least $80 billion in repairs to upgrade every water system and accommodate the state’s growing population, according to its 2022 water plan.

Texas cities like Odessa feel the strain. At the center of the booming oil and gas industry, Odessa's decades-old water infrastructure is eroding and collapse-prone. When the valves leak, they can’t withstand the pressure, forcing crews to repeatedly shut down the entire city's water supply.

The first significant outage was in June 2022, when a broken main line left Odessa without water for almost 48 hours. This year, the city issued alerts for leaking valves or water line breaks at least six times. Despite crews' efforts to isolate the leaks, two resulted in outages that left tens of thousands without water for hours. When crews replaced those pipes and valves, a water boil notice followed, and residents couldn’t consume the water for another 24 hours.

Those problems also led to water loss, an extra cost to taxpayers. Crews must also release the pressure exerted on the valves while shutting down the plant by releasing water through fire hydrants.

City officials have yet to estimate the amount of water lost to leaks and outages — and how much it cost. One report released in May suggested that one outage cost the city upward of $4 million.

Odessa Mayor Javier Joven has sharply criticized the previous administration for dismantling a crew dedicated to maintaining the city’s roughly 3,000 valves. The city council hopes to reinstate the crew and include them in next year’s budget, set for approval in October.

“These are the things that we inherited,” Joven told the local economic development board. “Not things that have been created today, but what has been inherited. And this is what we're tasked to deal with. We can't ignore it and cannot afford to kick the can.”

Joven and the city council found surplus funds from waste water it sold to an oil and gas company to afford the repairs. They will use the revenue to pay for projects. The city had previously sought to use money intended to boost tourism for the repairs, an effort that would have required a change in state law. Joven asked the local economic development board and state Rep. Brooks Landgraf to consider the option. They will resume those discussions in August.

“I’m counting on and pleading the [Odessa Development Corporation] to … find a path that could give us a bump up relief to be able to access money that goes beyond what we have in the budget,” Joven said.

The city also plans to apply for the Texas Water Fund, which will distribute $1 billion for infrastructure projects across Texas. The state water board said it will release details in late July. It’s the first time Texas has invested significant money toward water infrastructure in years.

Jeremy Mazur, senior policy advisor with Texas 2036, said the problems in Odessa are emblematic of what will occur if cities and the state stall in securing the necessary resources to repair water and wastewater systems.

He said cities in Texas should not wait for state funding to address issues with their water infrastructure, adding that he acknowledges more rural cities may not have the necessary resources.

Mazur said that hotter temperatures strain pipes and accelerate corrosion. The state’s water plan predicts that continuing deterioration will cost Texans more than $150 billion in repairs and water loss in the next 50 years.

“The fact that [Odessa] is exercising due diligence is a good thing. Especially with communities… that may have the financial capacity and wherewithal to underwrite their own repairs,” he said. “But there are also hundreds if not thousands of other systems, particularly in small communities or rural communities, that just may not have the capacity to do this.”

The Environmental Protection Agency predicts Texas will spend $61 billion in the next two decades fixing and upgrading water infrastructure.

Texas’ most populous cities are already losing billions of gallons of water. Cities that reported their losses to the Water Development Board said they lost 88 billion gallons of water in 2023.

“People need to understand that if you don't want to have these problems, and if you want continuous, adequate and reliable water and wastewater service, you're going to have to pay for it,” Mazur said.

Disclosure: Texas 2036 has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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